WASHINGTON, DC — Governing is hard work. As demonstrated by the powerful TV images of Iraqi hotels, offices, and shops being " liberated " from the oppression of their contents, even the governance of cities and towns requires certain basic elements of structure and cooperation. Without such stability, all hell can break loose — even in the presence of the world’s most powerful army.

If the last few months have taught US policymakers anything, it is that the world’s most powerful military cannot be the sole pillar of global governance, either. The Bush administration may have walked away from a recalcitrant United Nations Security Council and successfully effected regime change in Iraq. But the costs to America’s prestige have been staggering. America has never been more unpopular in the world. The UN and other transnational bodies — including NATO — have been dealt body blows from which they will find it difficult to recover.

Not that any of the architects of the war on Iraq seems worried by this. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld saw the mass lootings across Iraq — including the ransacking of hospitals and a Baghdad museum with thousands of priceless artifacts that included the first known examples of human writing — as " untidy, " an unavoidable feature of the transition to democracy that has been overblown by the press.

In terms of international relations, perhaps one-quarter of the Bush administration puts on a public façade of calm about multilateralism’s perilous condition. This faction follows the lead of Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has been working overtime to reassure other nations that now that the Bush administration has had its way on Iraq, the US will be showing its kinder, gentler side. " The United States is not mad at the United Nations, " Powell told the BBC’s David Frost on Sunday. " We believe they have a role to play. "

Yet Powell is swimming against a powerful tide in the Bush White House. This strong current has swept aside tough negotiations over global pacts and bulldozed its way through the UN Security Council. It has even surged past naked assertions of American interest and into new territory — that of establishing America’s right to act unilaterally in matters of war and peace in contravention of the UN Charter.

The Bush administration laid out the markers for such a shift from its earliest days in office, refusing to sign on to both the Kyoto Protocol on the environment and the International Criminal Court and scrapping the ABM treaty, which safeguarded nuclear deterrence for over 25 years. After the September 11 attacks, the vise was tightened even further. NATO was virtually shut out of the US war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The White House’s commitment to international consensus over Iraqi disarmament was abandoned outright when its rigid timetable for invasion was frustrated by UN weapons inspectors and opposition from France and Russia — both of which hold Security Council vetoes.

This approach to foreign policy has been eagerly cheered on by a wide range of neoconservative thinkers who have long called for a diminution of the UN’s influence or the outright annulment of US involvement with it. In the past, the fight has been waged in the media and in Congress via the withholding of America’s UN dues. Yet what, in fact, are we losing in the Bush administration’s headlong rush to toss aside the United Nations and the international consensus that it represents? In his eloquent and widely publicized letter of resignation in March, State Department career diplomat John Brady Kiesling succinctly captured the costs of this palpable shift in the US stance toward global institutions and international consensus. " We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, " wrote Kiesling, " a web of laws, treaties, organizations and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America’s ability to defend its interests. "

Kiesling’s letter is a closely argued examination of the damage already done. Yet what may prove even scarier is what will come next. For all their attacks on the UN, the neoconservatives leading the charge have offered no credible vision of a future with a weakened or nonexistent UN. Even so, their political ax has cut sharply into American expectations regarding the UN — and their arguments have burrowed deeply into the assumptions of even the most progressive thinkers.

But does the idea of a hegemonic American empire have any clothes? Why has a system of international relations that has largely fulfilled expectations become so comprehensively discredited across the American political spectrum?

THE ALLEGED CRISIS in " global governance " — or the rules by which nations with vastly different political systems and agendas relate to each other and attempt to work together on a huge array of issues — is not borne out by its recent history. The current system of global governance dates back to the end of World War II, when the victorious powers of that conflict created the United Nations to manage future conflict. Despite many setbacks, snafus, and sniping from critics, the system has pretty much accomplished its intent — to prevent a rerun of World Wars I and II.

The Iraq imbroglio refocused the world’s attention on the UN’s role in global-governance issues. It also exposed the fault lines between the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China) — which form the core of the UN’s decision-making on the weightiest issues of war and peace.

Yet jabbing at the UN has long roots in American conservative thinking, and that history comes closer to explaining today’s troubles at the UN. Former US senator Timothy Wirth, president of the UN Foundation — a Washington, DC–based advocacy group for the UN and its charter — tells me that " to attack the UN has been in the conservative body politic for years. "

For years now, conservative commentator and failed GOP presidential contender Patrick Buchanan has called for kicking the UN out of its New York headquarters. In a 1997 column to that effect, Buchanan argued points that may evoke a bit of déjà vu. " Our NATO allies are leading the America-bashers, " wrote Buchanan. " Confided one Third World diplomat, ‘It’s your own allies who are cutting you down. The Nordics won’t vote to lower your assessments. The Europeans are fed up.’ " Or how about this old-school nugget from the same op-ed: " The New York Times quotes U.S. diplomats as saying there has ‘never been a worse time to represent the United States at the United Nations. The resentment against Washington is now openly expressed.’ "

Buchanan may have parted ways with his fellow neocons over the Iraq war, but this anti-UN virus in the conservative bloodstream has become more virulent in recent years. In 2003 alone, neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer has accused the United Nations of " moral bankruptcy, " strategic irrelevance, " " corruption, " " perversity, " " absurdity, " " hypocrisy, " and with being " empty, " " cynical, " and " mendacious. " The only thing Krauthammer left out was " mean to puppies. "

In the hands of neocon UN-bashers, even alleged policy discussions can get downright slanderous. A good recent example of the latter, penned by neocon Stephen Schwartz, came in the April 14 issue of the Weekly Standard. Schwartz’s piece, titled " U.N. Go Home, " purports to expose the UN’s shabby administration of the Serbian province of Kosovo to argue against any UN role in rebuilding Iraq.

Schwartz’s article is full of risible interpretations of Kosovo’s trouble, which he places entirely at the feet of the UN. Schwartz’s myopia is compounded by his refusal to pass up any opportunity to malign the UN and slander its employees as " locusts. " It’s a sinister view of the UN that borders on black-helicopter paranoia. To wit:

Many people seem to misunderstand what the U.N. is. They hear about potential United Nations involvement in Iraq, and believe the peoples of the world will unite, through their U.N. ambassadors, to make Iraq whole after the war. But this perception is mistaken. The U.N. is not the nations of the world united. It is an enterprise located in a building in New York, with satellite operations around the world, employing a certain cadre of people of many nationalities, most of whom are time-servers and ideologues.

Schwartz’s conclusion is clear. " The United States, " he boldly asserts, " must not permit the U.N., with its terrible record in the Balkans, among the Palestinians, in Africa, in Cambodia, and elsewhere, to inflict its incompetence and neuroses on the people of Iraq. "

Yet anti-UN iconoclasts have offered no credible plan to reform or replace it. Much like defenders of the " untidy freedom " now on display in post-Saddam Iraq, these neocon " thinkers " have called for replacing the UN with a toxic blend of anarchy and reactionary retaliation. They’d have the US in a permanent posse, rounding up new coalitions of willing outriders for every new mission. " The decline of NATO and the U.N. as useful forums, " wrote Max Boot, author of The Savage Wars of Peace (Basic, 2002) and cheerleader for the new model of American hegemony, in the March 3 issue of the Weekly Standard, " actually might be helpful in this regard, by restoring the diplomatic focus where it should have been all along — on relations between individual countries. "

Boot’s fanciful notion of international relations involves forming regional unions of nations geared to maximize US hegemony (i.e., no inconvenient naysayers need apply). Other neocons have argued, as James Traub noted in the April 13 issue of the New York Times Magazine, for shrinking down international decision-making either to the " Big Three " — the US, the UK, and Russia — or to simply an " English speakers only " group.